27.09.2005 Elephants really do fly.............
J. Parrish & Son are not un-nerved when it comes to things slightly out of the ordinary. We received a telephone call from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) requesting a that we move an elephant, to which we asked "is it a live one?" Actually it was a hand carved decorative stone elephant. Initially the elephant was destined for a London department store and ended up at London's Regents Park Zoo. The elephants were moved from Regents Park to the Whipsnade Wild Animal Park near Dunstable back in 2001 and as the old elephant house was due to be refurbished , we were requested to relocate the 4 tonne stone carving.
We arranged transport using one of our rear mounted crane vehicles to uplift the stone carving from Regents Park and place into our warehouse for temporary storage, until the site was ready at Whipsnade.
We carried out a site survey of the new location to determine what equipment would be required. The chosen site was a grass observation point over looking the elephant pastures and female elephant house with no direct access from any roadways. The closest we could get was 35m. The only obvious solution was to lift it into place using a mobile crane.
A 140 tonne mobile crane was chosen to to lift the 4 tonne stone carving to its new location.
The statue can now be seen overlooking its very own herd once more.
As ZSL are a registered charity, J. Parrish & Son worked together with Winterlift Crane Hire of Irlam near Manchester to provide the crane hire whilst we provided the transport and installation completely free of charge to ZSL. We would like to personally thank Andrew Winter for his kind assistance in this matter.
